How fast is a hard drive in an optical drive caddy? (ThinkPad T420)

I've just upgraded my ThinkPad T410 to a Samsung 840 128gb SSD and it's massively faster.

My wife has a T420, I'm planning to do the same upgrade for her, but she needs a lot more disk space, so I'm thinking of upgrading her main OS/apps drive to 128gb SSD and buying a caddy to convert the optical drive for her 500gb hard drive.

My question is how fast will that hard drive be in there? If it's slower than it was in the normal hard drive slot, will it cancel out the benefit of putting the OS and apps on the SSD, or will there still be a major noticeable speed difference? Is it still going to be significantly faster than a USB2 external drive (the T420 doesn't have USB3)?

(She mainly does a lot of Photoshop work on very big image files)

Cheers
Simon

 

As fast as the SATA connection or drive can be, whichever of those two happen to be the slowest. In you case, it would be the hard drive.

 

The Ultrabay in the T420 operates at SATA III speeds with the right drive and caddy, it definitely will be a lot faster than connecting via USB 2.0.

 

Or even USB 3.0 for that matter if you have a SSD in there.

 

The drive will be the original 500gb hard drive that shipped with the T420.

All the caddies I've looked at on eBay seem to be pretty similar - basically just a housing with a connector. None seem to mention anything that sets them aside as being faster than the others.

 

There's not much else other than that. All the caddy really is *is* a case with a connector. Now, perhaps the super-cheap caddies might cheapen out on the connector and use SATA II, but even then a HDD can't saturate that.

 

thanks - that's very helpful.

i really can't see the point of spending £55 on an official lenovo one!

 

Having a slow hard disk drive does not cancel out a SSD. They are independant. So everything loaded on the SSD will open very fast, things on the HDD will open just as she was used to. There is some education involved, as now she will have to deal with two drive letters, and decide what is best where. Also, 128gb is not very big. So you both need to keep on eye on it to make sure it isn't too full. Keep in mind over provisioning will make it even smaller.

 

Lenovo have been late on the game with the 12.7mm caddies, it took them over a year since the release of the T420 to launch a suitably sized caddy. For early adopters (like myself) it posed a problem of where to get a decent Ultrabay caddy that fits flush so your only choice at the time was one that was made by a third party.



As Jarhead said, standard platter drives rarely have the bandwidth to fully utilise SATA II speeds let alone SATA III so don't get bogged down by the numbers. I currently have a T420 with two drives, a 128GB Samsung 830 SSD and a 1TB Samsung HDD (my WD 500GB drive pictured got full last year!) in a Third Party 12.7mm Ultrabay and I haven’t encountered any problems during 2 years of usage. Personally I wouldn’t recommend the official one, not at £55 anyway considering the third party ones can do the same job for a fraction of the price.

 

I think she'll manage - she's currently got 8 terabytes of photos spread over 6 external drives ;-)

 

Wow, that is a lot of photos. Sounds like she is a pro... maybe you can fit Photoshop on the SSD so it will load FAST. I think she will love it.

 

that's the plan

 

All depends on the type on caddy, lower grade quality caddies will have a controller that is crap, sometimes it can be as slow as USB 2.0, and mechanical drives come nowhere near SSD speeds..

 

AFAIK those caddies don't include any electronics. They just have a cable between a socket for the HDD and the plug on the outside of the caddy.

It's possible however, that a very poor quality cable could cause signal degradation which would create errors and slow down the effective transfer rates.

John

 

There was no electrical difference between a $10 caddy from eBay and a $45 caddy from Newmodeus EXCEPT a missing capacitor between 5V and Ground (which is supposed to improve stability but really does nothing since the board/drive/both already have that).

The main difference is in the build quality - I'd recommend not getting the cheapest ones, both because you may have a harder time fitting the hard drive or fitting the caddy inside the laptop and because there's a higher (but still very low) chance you may get a DOA item (usually because of bad soldering).

The best choice is getting a slightly more expensive unit that ships from a local distributor (= more inspection and screening of defect items)...